This means that one can now accurately predict the traffic demand for a key phrase before optimising a website.

Like with any other marketing campaign the starting point is to have accurate market research data. It is only based on data that one can make more scientific predictions about a market and base decisions on numbers rather than conjecture.

Google, through its Keyword Tool https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal, now shows searches performed over the previous month and on average over the previous 12 months for geographically targeted search areas. This information is worth gold for the purposes of market research.

The application of this new development is best explained through an example. Lets say we run a ski lodge in Aspen and we wanted to market our offer via a website to tourists from the United Kingdom. We could obviously use any product and any geographical area including the US.

Now we can go to the Google Keyword Tool and do the following:

1. First we choose the language spoken by our target market. English is the default. Obviously if we were targeting any other languages we would select it here.

2. Secondly, we choose the country we are targeting. For the sake of our example we choose United Kingdom.

3. We leave the default "Descriptive words or phrases" radio button ticked. "Website content" can be used to research the Latent Semantic Indexing (LSI) of a top placed website - more about that next time.

4. We enter the key phrase we are researching. This would be the key phrase we think our target market are using to find us. In this case "aspen ski".

5. We leave the "Use synonyms" option ticked because we want Google to give us alternatives for our optimisation that we may not have thought of.

6. This is where the magic happens. From the results we can see the following (I'll just use one phrase to make the point).

"aspen resort" carried 260 searches in the UK in June and it has an average of 390 searches per year.

Obviously not everyone using this search phrase is going to actually come to the US to ski in Aspen. But lets assume for the sake of argument that 1% of these searchers is actually thinking of coming to Aspen. This means that 2.6 people are likely to be visiting. Since most people travel in pairs when going on a vacation, it means that 5.2 people are likely to come to Aspen from this key phrase alone. Obviously, a well thought out search engine marketing plan would include many more phrases.

Just to keep it simple lets look at the financial potential 5.2 people using our resort. Let's assume we charge $375.00 for a room we could make an extra $4500 per year just by choosing this phrase and making a special page in our website welcoming UK visitors.

If you multiply this by the number of available phrases you can see that can be a very profitable strategy.

It is for this reason that the introduction of the actual number of searchers per phrase in the Google Keyword Tool makes it such a powerful new feature which can be used to accurately predict the viability of online markets.